Featured photo by Brett Walker
Story by Brett Walker
If you want more news like this, sign up for the Sidelines weekly newsletter here! Find it in your inbox every Thursday afternoon.
MURFREESBORO, Tenn- Middle Tennessee football trotted onto the practice field Tuesday for day five of fall camp, this time with the watchful eye of the press for the program’s first media day of the Derek Mason era.
This Blue Raider team is drastically different from the one that fell to Sam Houston at the end of last season. With the shift to Mason following the firing of longtime head coach Rick Stockstill, the roster and coaching staff naturally underwent significant changes this offseason.
Nearly half of the Middle Tennessee roster for 2024 consists of fresh faces, as the program brought in 59 new players since Middle Tennessee hired Mason last December. To bring the team together, Mason and the coaching staff created culture groups to encourage bonding. The groups are broken up into mentors and players, or as Mason calls them, champions and siblings. These culture groups allow the staff to work on bonding from the inside out, rather than bringing in an outsider to talk to the team about it, Mason said.
“It’s old and young, positions guys are with different position guys,” Mason said of his culture groups. “So, we’re actually getting to know ourselves. We talk about, what’s your history, who’s your hero, and what’s your heartache. I think that’s been a great part for us to really establish who we are and really get to know each other in a time and space where you don’t have a lot of time.”
With drastic turnover, the coaches rely on the players buy-in to unite the team. This approach, which Mason coined as “player-led; coach-fed,” is being spear headed by veteran leadership.
“Nick Vattiato, Devyn Curtis, and BH (Brendon Harris) have been paramount to this football team,” Mason said. “I think what matters is that when you have guys that do the work, don’t talk about it, but they do it and it shows up every day, it makes it easy for us to point to leadership and say; this is what it is.”
While many players, such as Richard Kinley and Jakobe Thomas decided to hit the transfer portal for Power 4 opportunities after last season, Vattiato, the veteran quarterback, opted to stay in Murfreesboro with the new regime. Similarities between Mason and his former head coach, Stockstill, influenced his decision to stay put, Vattiato said.
“We just started to build our relationship from the time he got here,” Vattiato said. “It came with a lot of trust, we had to build that trust. He was very clear about what he wanted, and we shared the same goals and intentions. Moving forward I think just him and I being on the same page, we agreed, this is what we want and we’re going to take this team. He’s our leader, and the players are going to lead, and we’re going to compete and do everything we do each day.”
With many new teammates, the fourth-year quarterback understood his head coach’s message — that veteran leaders would have to rise to the occasion to field a competitive football team in 2024. During the pre-season, the Blue Raiders have relied on athletes like graduate safety Brendon Harris, redshirt senior tight end, Holden Willis and redshirt junior defensive end Brandon Buckner to blend new players with returning ones, Vattiato said.
“You have really smart, strong, confident leaders who can lead this team,” Vattiato said. “Then you have other guys, young guys who start to follow, and that’s when you really start to get a team. A team that gels together, and they kind of all move as one. There’s no one lagging behind. I think that’s really going to translate to the field when the games start happening.”
In one of the biggest additions of the offseason for Middle Tennessee, junior wide receiver Omari Kelly transferred into the program. After two years at Auburn, Kelly elected to transfer to MTSU. The six-foot, 180-pound Kelly found an on-field connection with his quarterback early on. In the Blue Raider spring game last April, he led receivers with six catches for 93 yards. While Kelly clearly bonded with Vattiato on the field, his quarterback’s relationships with players off of it have made the real difference.
“Nick has made probably one of the best impressions out of everybody since I’ve been here,” Kelly said. “From welcoming me in, because I didn’t know anybody here on the team, so. Nick was one of the first people I met, and I feel like the way he kind of brought me in helped me and him get a better connection.”
Middle Tennessee wrapped practice Tuesday in a competition period between the offense and defense. Mason kept a score tally during the period as the two sides of the ball cheered and chirped against one another like it was the 4th quarter of a rivalry game. What was on the line? Was it cash? Was it a day off? Was it even free lunch? No. The losing team owed Mason 15 pushups, hardly a workout for Division 1 football players.
“It’s good, genuinely, that’s what I’m talking about right,” Mason said of his team’s energy. “That’s not a coach thing, that’s a player thing. This group has got a different type of bounce to it. And that bounce, you can’t fake that.”
Despite the roster overhaul, it seems that this Blue Raider group has managed to gel with one another on the backs of the leadership from veterans and that of the coaching staff. It is leadership that Middle Tennessee will have to lean on as they kick off the season at August’s end.
Brett Walker is the sports editor for MTSU Sidelines. For more news, visit www.mtsusidelines.com. Also, follow us on Facebook and Instagram @mtsusidelines, or on X @MTSUSidelines. Also, sign up for our weekly newsletter here.
